The Zimbabwe Peace Project reported 910 incidents of politically-inspired human rights violations in July compared with 1,014 in June, but said that political tensions and intolerance continue to run high nationwide

Ntungamili Nkomo | Washington

Politically-motivated violence and human rights violations declined in July from June levels, but political tensions remain high in many of the country's provinces, the Zimbabwe Peace Project has said in its latest monthly report.

General Secretary Shan Cretin is currently visiting AFSC's programs in Africa, and sent this report.

On August 29, I arrived in Harare for my first visit to AFSC’s programs in Zimbabwe. This morning, our program director, Nthanbiseng Nkomo drove Dereje Wordofa and me to a meeting with the partners and participants in the Hatcliffe Extension Project. The residents of Hatcliffe Extension have been displaced from their homes and resettled three times since the 1980’s, losing access to livelihoods, shelter, and basic services in the process.

• Availability of basic food stuffs remains stable throughout the country. Household cereal stocks and purchases remain the major source of staple cereals.

• Though the cost of living at a national level has been stable, it remains higher than the national average household income.Consequently, a significant proportion of households in both urban and rural areas, are facing serious challenges in accessing enough of their basic needs, including food.

Windhoek (Namibia), 27 August 2011 – The Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) Disaster Risk Reduction Unit in partnership with the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and UNISDR is conducting a disaster risk reduction (DRR) stakeholders training workshop from 27-28 August 2011. The workshop will be held alongside the Fifteenth Southern Africa Region Climate Outlook Forum (SARCOF-15) from 29-30 August 2011.

HARARE — Zimbabwe's agricultural sector, which has seen a major downturn in recent years, is recovering on the back of increases in cotton and tobacco output, President Robert Mugabe said Friday.
"Agriculture has been on the rebound over the last two years," Mugabe said while opening an agriculture fair in the capital.

"The major drivers of agricultural growth have been mainly tobacco and cotton."

HARARE, 26 August 2011 (IRIN) - Barely a month after the Zimbabwean government reintroduced duties on imported food items such as cooking oil and maize meal to protect local manufacturers, the move appears to have backfired, making essentials unaffordable for low-income consumers.

The government scrapped import duties on cooking oil, sugar, maize meal, meat, salt, soap and other basic goods in 2009 to encourage the flow of these commodities into the country after the emptying of shop shelves in the wake of hyperinflation.

The cash-strapped government of Zimbabwe has asked for US$7 million to cater for asylum seekers at its Tongogara Refugee Camp in Chipinge, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), has confirmed.

Marcelline Hepie, UNHCR Zimbabwe Resident Representative, said: "Zimbabwe has asked for US$8 million, mainly in food aid from the latest Consolidated Appeal (CAP) for 2011. The UN is spending close to US$7 million on refugees here and about US$2,5 million has been spent already."

UNICEF is working closely with children around the country to protect them from being involved in prostitution a result of the country’s economic meltdown.

It’s Young People We Care Programme targets some 15,000 youths with information on how to avoid the trap of prostitution, which is rampant because of poverty.

Judith Sherman, Unicef’s HIV/AIDS advisor, said: “What we realised is that most young people in Zimbabwe today have grown up during an era of HIV and AIDS. For the past three decades the disease has been prevalent in their lives.”

JOHANNESBURG – A group of asylum seekers have applied to the Pretoria High Court for an order directing the government to provide adequate refugee reception offices across South Africa.

In an application that if successful could see Pretoria forced to revamp a refugee management system that is in a state of near- total collapse, the foreign immigrants want the home affairs ministry to address a host of problems including rampant corruption and overcrowding at its refugee reception offices.

JOHANNESBURG – Hunger and chronic malnutrition are on the rise in Zimbabwe, the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has said.

The UN organisation said significant crop loses in four of Zimbabwe’s 10 provinces would see the lean period setting in much earlier than usual in the affected provinces, a development it said could see nutrition levels further dropping especially among children and other vulnerable groups.

Ncube’s body was found August 9 in a ditch a few hundred yards from his homestead, wrapped in a sack, his head bearing the trauma of what appeared to be a blow from an axe

Taurai Shava & Violet Gonda | Zhombe & Washington

Family, friends and colleagues of Maxwell Ncube, a Midlands official of the Movement for Democratic Change formation of Welshman Ncube slain last week for suspected political motives, gathered in Zhombe on Wednesday for an outpouring of grief and anger.

LUANDA — Southern African leaders ended two-day talks Thursday with no major progress announced in resolving leadership battles in Zimbabwe and Madagascar that have topped the regional agenda in recent years.

The closing statement of the 15-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit in Angola's capital echoed a June meeting with calls for further mediation efforts to resolve the crises in the two countries.

HARARE, 18 August 2011 (IRIN) - Tedius Bere, 31, from Chivi District in Zimbabwe's southeastern Masvingo Province, recently travelled to the capital Harare to ask for his brother's help to buy food for his family, whom he had left in Chivi with only enough maize meal for two days.

"I had no choice but to ask my brother for money. because we are facing real starvation," Bere told IRIN as he laboured to load two 50kg bags of maize meal onto the roof of the bus he would use to return home.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. Government, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), announced the expansion of its Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) program. IRS is the application of safe insecticides to the indoor walls and ceilings of a home or structure in order to interrupt the spread of malaria by killing mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite. Malaria is the number one killer in Africa.